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There are lots of good tools out there for troubleshooting and solving problems that can occur in your environment. The “All-in-one” Admin tool is a good collection documented and available for download in Technote 1459332. Here is a list of the tools included:

The technote goes on to explain how to set up the AIX “Audit” tool to monitor changes to files at the operating system level. Think someone is logging in and touching your notes.ini file… audit it, any other key files (names.nsf, admin4.nsf, critical application database) that you want to make sure is not being touched by anyone outside of Domino.. audit it.

I can think of a few instances this would have been useful to have in place on a server. The only downside is you have to set up “Audit” to specifically track a file, so while you might not audit every file on a Domino server starting with notes.ini and names.nsf might be a good idea.

The technote also warns you:

NOTE:Since the audit tool in this example will be documenting every read/write event for names.nsf, this output can be extremely verbose.

so make sure you have enough disk space, and understand how to purge out the audit logs before they fill up your disk.

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I had a great time participating in Speedgeeking at Lotusphere, I wanted to share my slides from the session (all 7 of them). In looking them over I realize that they were really designed to be spoken to, but I don’t have time to make any changes right now, so figured I would share them in case anyone was looking for them.

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This came up today, I haven’t had to use this trick in a while, but it is a good one to have up your sleeve if you ever need it, since I taught this trick to one person already today, figured I would throw it out there for anyone else working in mixed environments and in need of it.

If you ever need a Database to be created at a specific ODS (especially a lower one than the client you are using) you can replace .NSF with any of the values in the chart below when creating the replica or copy (you can not simply rename an existing file).

Extension

ODS Level

.n85

51

.ns8

48

.ns7

43

.ns6

43

.ns5

41

.ns4

20

.ns3

17

If you rename the file with an NSF extension it will retain the ODS it was created it, however the Compact task will never upgrade the ODS of a database created with an ODS Specific extension, even after being renamed with an .NSF extension. Technote 1086780 has more details.

(One more note, if you were just looking to get a database to ODS 43 you could also do this by removing CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1 or CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1 from your notes.ini, restarting your Notes client, and simply creating a .NSF. Any databases created using this method would be upgradeable later on via compact)

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If you are running DAOS, you know that Transaction Logging is a prerequisite to enable DAOS on your server. Ever wondered what would happen if you turned Transaction Logging off? I tried it, and am actually really pleased with how this was implemented.

When you go in to your server document and change Transaction Logging to Disabled, when you save the document you get this warning:

and then when you say OK you get this:

What is happening here is any new attachments will now be stored in the NSF file, instead of the DAOS store (obviously losing any DAOS benefits), but the key is that any attachments already stored in the DAOS store will continue to work just fine, when a document is accessed the associated attachment will be there as it was when Transaction Logging was enabled.

I am of course not suggesting that you go try this on your production servers, but it is nice to see that there is some resiliency built in to DAOS, and should anything go wrong with your Transaction Logs, DAOS will keep serving up attachments.

After transaction logging is re-enabled attachments will automatically go back to being stored in the DAOS store, however you will have to run a Compact –c on all databases to get the attachments that were stored in the NSF while Transaction Logging was disabled moved to DAOS.

If by some chance you have not yet looked at DAOS, you might want to grab the DAOS Estimator tool and start calculating your potential disk savings, and don’t forget the impact DAOS can have on your backups as well.

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Domino Fast Server Restart was introduced in Domino 8, it was designed for 32 bit versions of AIX and Solaris. The idea was in the event of a server crash the server could be restarted, while NSD was still running to collect diagnostics on the crashed server. The only caveat was that you were required to have sufficient memory to run both the crashed instance, and the new instance. The good news is Server Fast Restart is disabled by default, I don’t know how many people implemented it (I remember testing it at one point, but don’t believe I ever enabled it on a production server). Server Fast Restart is not supported in 64 bit versions of Domino, and IBM is now recommending that Fast Restart not be used at all. Other technotes related to Fast Server Restart seemed to have vanished. Might be worth double checking the old notes.ini file and make sure you have it disabled.

When you load up the Files tab of the Domino Administrator Client it lists all the files in the Data directory, including some of the files under the datadomino directory. In Domino 8.5 and later there are many more files under the dataDomino directory (Dojo) which are included in the scan for Files.

You can disable this using a notes.ini parameter ADMIN_CLIENT_SKIP_DOMINO=1 When set this will prevent the scanning of the datadomino directory when you load the Files tab in the Administrator client and you will be much happier with your load times.

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